Though not usually my favorite Atheist, Christopher Hitchens makes extremely provocative and amazing opening statement before his debate on religion with ex-British PM Tony Blair.

Like any truly honest student of religious history, I tend to resist the urge to say that I am definitely certain of anything when it comes to religion..  However if forced at gunpoint to choose sides between those that believe and those that don't I would not hesitate to take my place standing with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.

Of the three my library only contains books written by Harris and Dawkins, as I have always found Hitchens to be somewhat pompous and imperious for my tastes.

Having said that I was rendered slack-jawed at Hitchens amazing opening statement (Starts at the 4:53 mark) in the beginning of his debate with Tony Blair.  Here read it for yourself.

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical phrase from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original since with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.

However, let no one say there's no cure, salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said, it must be said, would have to admit makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims.

Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?

To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed not man-made code. (You can find the entire transcript at the New Statesman.)

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of religion and its importance to humanity, the words spoken above must, at the very least, give one pause. It is even more impressive that Hitchens remains so defiant to the comforting, yet intellectually numbing embrace of religion when he faces his own mortality in the form of esophageal cancer.

My combative personal relationship with religion has always been defined by the fact that it asked too much of me in exchange for its simple answers to the complex questions of my life.  It demands that I turn off my critical thinking and eschew logic in exchange for allowing its tendrils to enter my consciousness and soothe my troubled spirit.

However, apparently unlike many other Americans, there is NO off switch connected to my critical thinking, and NOTHING troubles my spirit as much as creating distance between it and logic.  In short there is simply no way for me to get from where I am, to where the millions of people who readily embrace religion and accept on faith what science has been completely unable to discover have positioned themselves.

In my opinion, and please feel free to disagree with me, the very idea of choosing belief over reason seems to be the denying of that which makes us human.  After all isn't it this amazing intellect of ours which has allowed us to elevate ourselves out of the day to day fight for survival which defines the life of the creatures to whom we feel so superior?

Here we are a species which has unlocked the very genome that identifies what makes us human, and explored the mysteries of space, and yet we still run toward the comforting bedtime fables of religious belief when we are overwhelmed by our troubles or feel fear at the approaching of our own mortality.

What am I missing?